Major AWS outage takes down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and more

On October 20th, a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused widespread disruptions to various online services, including Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, ChatGPT, and the Epic Games Store. The outage primarily affected the US-EAST-1 Region, though it also impacted services in other regions globally. The AWS status checker reported that multiple services were "impacted" by operational issues, and users experienced various problems, such as Alexa being unable to respond to queries or complete requests. The outage also affected platforms running on AWS's cloud network, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, and the McDonald's app. Amazon acknowledged the issue and reported that it was "actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause." After several hours, Amazon stated that they were seeing "significant signs of recovery" and that "most requests should now be succeeding." However, the exact cause of the outage has not been confirmed, and it's unclear when full service will be restored. AWS outages in the US-East-1 region have caused similar widespread disruptions in the past, highlighting the dependence of many online services on the cloud infrastructure.